I'm using a 500 gig now; and it's bursting at the seams, even with only about 1/10th of my Steam folder installed and no videos saved on my drive, etc. So I want to upgrade to a 2 or 3 terabyte drive, but I'm not sure what's good at that range; is it pretty much a case of them all being fairly equal? I'd love to do an SSD 512 gig just for my games but there's no way that's in the budget so mechanical drives it is.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

If I installed most of my steam folder, it'd probably take about a terabyte. With just the OS and non game apps, an SSD would only have to be about 128 gigs (actually could probably be smaller) but games are the only truly intensive applications I use so it always just seemed pointless to me, to spend the cash to get faster boot times.

Ugly people have sex all the time. We wouldn't have 6 and a half billion humans if you had to be beautiful to get laid.

The secret? Keep only the really heavy games that load slowly on the SSD. You'll find that that number of those is smaller than you think it is. Oh of course, and these days, don't get an SSD smaller than 256GB.

A third thing to keep in mind: even with just the OS, an SSD will also host your pagefile. And pagefile on an SSD = goodness.

There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(

Depending on a SSD for a pagefile is a great indicator that your system needs more ram. Systems with sufficient ram and without applications that specifially require on don't even need to have a pagefile.

Depending on a SSD for a pagefile is a great indicator that your system needs more ram. Systems with sufficient ram and without applications that specifially require on don't even need to have a pagefile.

Not entirely true. It won't write as frequently to the pagefile, but it will be used. Please stop killing the pandas.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Depending on a SSD for a pagefile is a great indicator that your system needs more ram. Systems with sufficient ram and without applications that specifially require on don't even need to have a pagefile.

If the system has plenty of surplus RAM, the system should only hit the pagefile when anomalous situations arise, e.g. runaway process with a memory leak. If this happens and you *don't* have a pagefile, the result will be random system instability and/or a system crash.

There is *no* valid reason I can think of to disable the pagefile on a modern desktop OS.

If you've got plenty of RAM, go ahead and put the pagefile on mechanical storage if you don't want to reserve SSD space for it. It won't materially impact performance since it'll only get used in the above mentioned anomalous situations, and when (not if) those situations *do* arise, it'll prevent the system from crashing.

For heaven's sake, don't disable the pagefile. Doing so is just plain silly.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

paulWTAMU wrote:Please dear god tell me there's a way to just make an image of my drive and slap it on there without having to redownload a plethora of patches

Just a simple drive transfer? You can just image the drive onto the the larger drive using a lot of tools. Since you are going from mechanical to mechanical, there is really nothing much you have to worry about, assuming you are not on XP still.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

I did this a few years ago... grabbed a 256gb ssd, and another 1TB WD black...

Made backup of the OS to reinstall from if anything went wrong, and then transferred my steam files directly onto the 1TB WD after just installing steam on the 1TB, drive after going through the OS install on the SSD. Only thing to do when reinstalling the OS is to disconnect all other drives to avoid the common issue of boot partition ending up on the wrong drive (Yah MS!). Though if you're just getting a larger HDD and doing an image transfer then you shouldn't have any problems.

I've got my system set up with 240GB Crucial M4 SSD for boot, 1TB WD Black for most items, 2TB other drive for bulk of data/torrents/videosI have no issues other than there are still the occasional programs/games that don't ask which drive to install on.

Though for true mass storage I do have a server with 15TB in the basement.

For good performance the WD Black and the one Hitatchi drive (read reviews to find it ) seem to be the best but most people won't notice.

You should be able to use Macrium Reflect Free to clone over to your new drive from within Windows, restart the machine, change the boot order to the new drive being first, boot into windows on your new drive. I would probably recommend the step of disconnecting your current drive after you clone to the new one, before you restart - it will take any guesswork out of which drive is being used and keeps your install on your old drive safe, should the worst happen. After a couple of days, hours, weeks -- whatever your threshold is -- plug the old drive in, reformat, reuse, etc. or go put it in a remote location as a full backup as of right now.